short balls: renee reverberations

Sunday sun: The sun is out in NYC today, but before TSF East goes galavanting through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, we wanted to check in on the week that was for Renee, Eric Drath’s Renee Richards documentary at the now-ending TriBeCa Film Festival.

I checked out the film this past Thursday with TSF contributor Troy Venechanos and was wowed by Renee’s story. Like most followers of the pro game, I knew the Renee story as a monumental one. But, as a 25-year-old, I didn’t understand its historic significance, nor did I realize how it divided the sport as it did. One festival goer asked Drath in the post-movie Q&A about Chris Evert‘s involvement in being interviewed for the docu (only a clip of Evert from the 70s appears in the film). “Her agent made it clear she didn’t want to be involved,” Drath told the questioner.

But Martina, BJK and Johnny Mac all appeared in candid, recent interviews. Perhaps most telling were the host of Renee’s — and Dick’s (Renee before her transformation) — friends who told the story from a personal POV. Compelling to say the least.

Headliner: The film got an extra boost from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote about it in her column this week when news broke that a transgender woman in Maryland had been beaten at a McDonald’s. And of course the Village Voice‘s Michael Musto had his musings on the film, too.

Watch: The film was part of the ESPN line-up at TFF and will air on the channel on a TBD date this fall.